Inspired by a Bunny Wabbit

The freedom in cartoons to transcend the laws of basic physics, to hop around in time and space, and to skip from one dimension to another has long been a crucial aspect of imaginative poetry.

By

Billy Collins

Updated June 28, 2008 11:59 p.m. ET

BugsThere he leans: cracking wise, biting his bright orange carrot bugging the world speed demon ventriloquist and master of disguise he is everywhere at once buck-toothed and spectacularly eared he is armed with dynamite he is the only one who really knows what's up.

ENLARGE

JT Morrow

Whenever a writer is interviewed or subjected to a Q&A session after a reading, one of the questions that always comes up has to do with influence. If only we knew who made the author jealous enough to move him to emulation, a secret would be revealed and the mysteries of the creative process would be clarified. Such a curiosity is akin to wanting to trace the lineage of a foundling abandoned one snowy night on the steps of a convent. Locate the parents and discover the nature of the child. The question of literary influence itself is a tricky one. For one thing, it offers the author the opportunity to duck it by substituting for his actual influences certain names the dropping of which is designed to impress. Thus, an author may actually choose his parents by devising a more respectable list of forebears than the stuff that really formed his imagination or made him reach for a pen. A poet, for instance, might stroke his chin thoughtfully, look up at the ceiling, as if his influences resided there like putti, and say "Well, Yeats, of course. And Eliot. We mustn't leave out Eliot."

Another tendency that limits and skews the discussion is that writers almost invariably stay within their own genre when pressed to identify influential predecessors. Poets name poets. Novelists nod to other novelists. But the truth is that influence enters us from all sides. It is the chlorine in the flood of experience that spills continuously into the conscious mind. A short-story writer may have been influenced by 18th-century Dutch painting as much as anything else -- or by his mother's cooking. A painter may have been marked by her love of album covers or the childhood love of her cousin. And with that said, I am free to confess that my own poetry would have not developed in the direction it did, for better or worse, were it not for the spell that was cast over me as a boy by Warner Bros. cartoons. The very first time I heard the pulse-quickening blast of the zany theme music by Carl Stalling -- enough to bring any American boy to attention -- and saw the colorful bull's-eye emblazoned on the big screen, I was hooked.

PorkyHappy only when he is gardening alone far from conversation and the terrible stammering far from Petunia, nag and tease just resting on a hoe unembarrassed as he contemplates the blue background of his flat world -- a Zen pig.

ENLARGE

Thomas Reis

I think what these animations offered me besides some very speedy, colorful entertainment was an alternative to the static reality around me that dutifully followed the laws of the physical world. The brothers Warner presented a flexible, malleable world that defied Newton, a world of such plasticity that anything imaginable was possible. Bugs Bunny could suddenly pull a lawn mower, or anything else that might come in handy, out of his pants pocket, and he wasn't even wearing pants. Flattened by a 500-pound anvil, Wile E. Coyote could snap back into shape in a heartbeat. A box containing a pair of Acme rocket-powered roller skates would arrive in the desert with no sign of a delivery service (though you suspected it would be called Ace Delivery).

Plus, characters could jump dimensions, leaping around in time and space, their sudden exits marked by a rifle-shot sound effect. Anticipating the tricks of metafiction, these creatures could hop right out of the world of the cartoon and into our world, often Hollywood itself to consort with caricatures of Eddie Cantor and Marilyn Monroe. Or Bugs would do the impossible by jumping out of the frame and landing on the drawing board of the cartoonist who was at work creating him. This freedom to transcend the laws of basic physics, to hop around in time and space, and to skip from one dimension to another has long been a crucial aspect of imaginative poetry. Robert Bly developed a poetics based on the notion of psychic "leaping," where the genius of a poem is measured by its ability to leap without warning from the conscious to the unconscious and back again. Bly's short poem "After Long Busyness" provides an example of leaping by association and captures the skittish motions of thought:

I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk. Moon gone, plowing underfoot, no stars; not a trace of light! Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in this open field? Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted.

As an early devotee of Looney Tunes cartoons, I was fascinated by the strange freedoms of these characters, especially their ability to shape-shift -- like Ovid on speed. Clearly, Bugs Bunny knows as much about leaping, not to mention whirling, zooming and, of course, hopping, as any of the great Spanish poets whom Bly credits with the knack of slipping through walls from one room of the psyche into another. Bugs can be in two places at once, which he is whenever Elmer Fudd points his shotgun down one of the two holes of the rabbit's underground residence. And just as Pirandello and other modern dramatists sought to break down the actor/audience barrier, so Looney Tunes allowed an animated character to talk directly to the movie house audience or to criticize the very hand of its animators, thereby betraying the text itself. In one cartoon which mixes animation with a live action sequence, Porky Pig barges into producer Leon Schlesinger's office demanding to be let out of his contract. Another cartoon opens quietly with the figure of Elmer Fudd in full hunting regalia tip-toeing left to right through the woods. Then, as if noticing a noisy late-comer to the theater or the sound of a shaken box of candy, Fudd stops, turns to face the audience, puts one of his four fingers to his lips and says in a seething whisper: "Shhhh! It's wabbit season." Ah, Elmer, you unlikely modernist! What were your creators reading? Was animator Chuck Jones curling up at night with a volume of French surrealist poetry?

DaffyHe tears across the landscape, blabbering in lunatic flight from those who would pluck his jet feathers wring the stem of his neck twist his yellow beak flatten him under steamrollers his brain is a gumball and with it he tears across the landscape, haywire jabbering and amok outdistancing clouds of dust.

Animated Reading

When watching cartoons isn't enough, there are plenty of books on the subject, from historical surveys to scholarly treatments.

Chuck Jones, the animator behind Looney Tunes, gives behind-thescenes stories in his 1989 memoir, "Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist." For a broader perspective, "Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons," written by film critic Leonard Maltin, surveys the field from its silent-film beginnings through the 1980s.

Studios put a lot of effort into their early cartoon scores, which incorporated classical music, popular songs, jazz and opera. In the 2005 "Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon," Daniel Goldmark looks at songs written for animated films from the 1930s to the 1950s. Included is a detailed analysis of the famous Looney Tunes parody of Wagner, "What's Opera, Doc?"

Animated films have inspired a number of academic readings, with scholars recently looking at portrayals of race and gender. Published in February, "The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation" argues that Disney films have helped shape perceptions of the environment. The animals in movies like "Bambi" have especially helped build empathy with the natural world, argues David Whitley, a lecturer at Cambridge University in the U.K.

"The Simpsons" has been a popular cultural studies topic lately. "The Gospel According to the Simpsons," updated in 2007, examines how the TV show depicts faith in America. Author Mark Pinsky provides lots of quotes, including one from Homer who is accidentally hit in the face with an ice cream cone while he's on a hunger strike. "Nice try, God," he says, "but Homer Simpson doesn't give in to temptation that easily."

Strange as it may seem, these cartoons also provided me with an education about things that were not part of the curriculum of a Catholic grammar school of the 1950s. The nuns at St. Joan of Arc in Queens were adroit at teaching me spelling, geography, and lots of catechism, but Looney Tunes cartoons (despite their frivolous name) introduced me to much that lay beyond the precincts of a fairly sheltered childhood. They gave me my first taste of worldliness itself.

As unsophisticated as any nine year old, I had never been to an opera when I saw Chuck Jones's Wagnerian parody in which Bugs sings Br&uuml;nnhilde's role in a blonde wig stuffed under a helmet with horns. The first symphony orchestra I ever saw was a cartoon one with a fat man playing a tiny flute and a studious-looking dog with triangle duties -- plus, a conductor wielding a "baton" and wearing "tails." There I saw my first bassoon. Before I had ever been to a French restaurant, there on the movie screen was a canine waiter twirling his mustache and pouring wine for a poodle and his date at "Caf&eacute; de Paris." I was innocent of undertakers until I saw a large dog in a black suit measuring Daffy Duck for a coffin. I didn't know what "running away from home" meant until I saw Porky Pig walking toward the vanishing point with a stick over his shoulder, a polka dot kerchief tied to it containing the sum of his material possessions. I'm not sure I knew what Champagne was until I saw Pep&eacute; Le Pew popping a bottle while dressed in smoking jacket (huh?) and fancy slippers. A bullfight, badminton, a punch-clock, a barbershop complete with hot-towel cooker and razor strop -- all of these pieces of the adult world were delivered to me in Technicolor episodes six minutes long. This was the length that was set as a minimum for a "short" by movie theatre exhibitors and as a maximum by a frugal Leon Schlesinger. In the labor-intensive days before digital, one second of film involved 12 to 24 drawings. A good animator could produce just 15 seconds per week. In the end, it was the perfect-size package to deliver all this wacky news.

ElmerThe mailbox in front of the neat cottage spells out the unfortunate name. This morning the homebody is singing in his sunny kitchen dum-dee-dum, waiting for the tea water to boil. Later he will have his nap, the enormous pink head rolling on the pillow dreaming again of the wabbit, the private carrot patch. Waiting by his bed is the shotgun and the ridiculous hat for he is the human.

The Mount Rushmore of Warner Bros. cartoons would be composed of the not-so-solemn faces of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and the token human, Elmer Fudd. As a young viewer, I had no doubts about the superiority of this gang to the characters of Disney. Disney cartoons were tame, conventional, Apollonian. Warner Bros.' were manic, unnerving, iconoclastic, spastic, Dionysian. The most telling difference was that the Disney characters had romantic partners, spouses, even families of a kind. There was something treacly about the scenes where Mickey and Minnie's smooches were accompanied by all those little red hearts floating in the air. Donald had his Daisy and somehow three nephews even though their parent, the duck's brother or sister, was never mentioned. The Disney characters were socialized, domesticated, bourgeois. Warner Bros. characters, with the exception of hen-pecked Porky and his Petunia, were mavericks -- unregenerate, anti-social. There is no Mrs. Fudd. And a Mrs. Daffy Duck? Inconceivable. Sex in the Warner toons was more likely to be transgressive and connected to deception, especially cross-dressing. Bugs is quick to put on a frock and kiss Elmer on the mouth but only for the purpose of fooling his perennial victim. Disney-romance led to marriage. Warner Brothers-romance was linked to guile and aimed at redress.

The late 1920s to the mid-1950s were an innovative time for animation. Film studios introduced many iconic characters, and "pretty much every principle that animators use today was discovered," says animation historian Charles Solomon. Here are some highlights.

My taste for these cartoons would grow into adulthood obsession, which I shared with a few friends. One fellow addict was Todd McEwen, whose novel "Arithmetic" ends with a tour-de-force paean to these cartoons, his language keeping pace with the pictorial speed of animation. My pal Michael Shannon was not only a fan but a brilliant re-enactor of many famous Looney Tunes scenes. He and I would habitually visit the Museum of Cartoon Art, then housed in a castle-like building in Rye, N.Y., where we would ignore Popeye, Pogo, Archie, and other distractions to sit in an otherwise empty screening room and order from a menu of Warner Bros. classics. I remember several debates we had on the directorial merits of Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng, always arriving at the same conclusion: Freleng's work was energetic and zany, but Chuck Jones was blessed or cursed with a touch of divine madness.

Mr. Jones's illustrated autobiography, "Chuck Amuck," is peopled by a group of illustrators and idea-men like Tex Avery, Robert McKimson and Mike "Road Runner" Maltese, plus musical director Carl Stalling, sound-effects genius Treg Brown, and, of course, Mel Blanc who did nearly all the voices. Strange to think of these grown men, usually photographed in dark suits and ties, gathering in their own shack on the Warner Bros. lot to devise new ways for a rabbit to hoodwink a duck. But under the zaniness, Mr. Jones saw only human behavior. As he puts it: "Bugs Bunny is simply...trying to remain alive in a world of predators; Elmer Fudd considers himself a simple sportsman -- he hunts only for the "thwill" of it...Wile E. Coyote and Sylvester are simply trying to get something to eat." And what could be more human than the allegorical battle of cat and canary? Incidentally, one gem found in his book is that the actual camera crane used in the animation studios (up to 6,000 drawings had to be photographed per cartoon) was indeed an Acme product.

And speaking of the good people who supplied the hungry coyote -- dinner napkin hopefully tied around his neck -- with his anvils, TNT plungers, and helicopter-in-a-backpack, one sign of the unflagging interest in Looney Tunes is the recent publication of "The Acme Catalog." Now anyone can purchase a Rocket Sled, a Y-Shaped Branch, or -- my favorite -- Instant Tunnel Paint. In his introduction, the Vice-President of Customer Service claims that the business "is guided by a simple two-word philosophy: caveat emptor -- 'the customer is always right,' or something." And that is evidence enough to reassure me that the Looney Tunes flag still flies high -- the unmistakable bull's-eye and Porky Pig letting us know that that is, indeed, all, folks.

—The four accompanying poems appeared in Billy Collins's first publication, "Pokerface," from 1977.

Billy Collins is a former U.S. poet laureate. His ninth collection of poems, "Ballistics," will be published in September.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.